ABSTRACT
A glance at Tzvetan Todorov's extensive publications already gives an idea of the variety of disciplines he engages with, from poetics, with Russian Formalism, discursive genres, structuralism and enunciation, and the eponymous series he coedited with Gerard Genette at Seuil for roughly fifteen years, to literary theory, anthropology, history and cultural memory, history of ideas, in particular the French moralists and French humanism and debate on recent or unfolding historical events, such as the Iraq War. The distorted, if not simplistic, vision of French structuralism which is common currency on the other side of the Channel and, even more so, of the Atlantic, may be responsible for the neglect of Todorov's book in Mikhail Bakhtin studies in the English-speaking world. Todorov here inverts the hierarchy between dialogism and intertextuality and considers text as the overarching category of which intersubjectivity is but a part.
